


Honour Thy Blade

by barghest



Series: With Dishonour [3]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Ableism, Disabled Character, Gen, Graphic Description, Hospitals, I'm Bad At Tagging, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Suicide Attempt, wow thats actually a tag thanks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-31
Updated: 2016-12-31
Packaged: 2018-09-13 15:56:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9131371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/barghest/pseuds/barghest
Summary: Under the neon lights that line his father’s study, they tell Hanzo they are disappointed in him.(more rp blog work, post-genji's 'death')





	

**Author's Note:**

> uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu self explanatory  
> more rp blog work!  
> i think you can guess what hanzo tries to do

Under the neon lights that line his father’s study, they tell him they are disappointed in him. His hands, still heavy and slick with drying blood, sunk into the grooves of his palms, shake but yet they still don’t let him sit down. Hanzo stands in the foot holes left by countless others who have stood before his family, and begs forgiveness just the same. He does not need to meet their eyes, sharp in the blue light that bathes them, to know he is to be denied.

“A dead son is less of a disappointment,” he knows the voice of his aunt, heavy with the smoke of her cigarette as she takes a drag, “than one still living with family blood on his hands.” She stubs the cigarette out in an ornate ash tray on his father’s desk and he feels it burn a hole in his chest.

Her words ring in his ears when they dismiss him, following him down the hall as he stumbles back to his room - he barely hears the door of the study slam behind him, barely feels the thickness of the air around him as it dawns on him what she means. He may as well be dead, in their eyes. He has ceased to exist as a Shimada, as a part of the family he shared blood with. Other infractions could be forgiven, but not the one that lay heavy in his hands. Hanzo descends to his knees at the door of his room, the metallic taste of his fingers pressing over his face as he tries to block the voices out of his ears. 

“We asked you to prune out the rot, not dig up the tree,” he flinches in memory, their tongues just as sharp in his head as when out loud.

“Your inability to follow orders simply cripples you further,” Hanzo crumbles forward until his forehead rests on the ground, fingernails digging into his hair.

“You have proved your uselessness once too many times,” and the way they had stared, until he could not meet their eyes, people whom had been warm enough for him to hug just hours before. Now they were icy and lifeless to the touch - if they would allow him that close. They had treated him like a stranger, a passer by in the street to be kept on the other side of a barrier of prestige and body guards. They didn’t need to call him scum out loud for him to understand.

He isn’t sure how he ends up in Genji’s room. No amount of explanation - when he had been permitted to speak, at all - had made the family believe him that it had been an accident. Hanzo sits on his brother’s bed, hands still red as he grips the sheets, scrunches them up, pulls the green throw over his lap, as if the soft fabric would soothe the tightness in his chest. The tattoo on his arm still burnt, still smouldered enough for wisps to escape the dragons’ mouths when he sat still long enough - every sting made his breath hitch a little. He is sorry. _He is so sorry._

But still they didn’t believe him. Or perhaps it just make him more pathetic in their eyes? That he could not even do something with intention. He doesn’t remember how he gets to be kneeled in front of Genji’s sword, still sat on its ceremonial stand, dust collecting in the ornate carving of the handle. But if he had intended - that was far worse, surely. It was far, far worse to him, at least. He had promised, first when Genji was born and again on Genji’s eighteenth, to protect him, and to even consider breaking that promise is enough to intensify the burn in his lungs and the weight in his heart.

Genji’s room is smaller than his own, but only fractionally. It has the better view - despite his trouble making, Genji was always father’s favourite - and a bigger bed, rarely used as of late. He likes the colour green, so much so it dominates the space, the walls a soft spring green and his silk sheets darker. His nightstand is a mess of wrappers and jewellery, make up and personal items, a framed photo taken when they were still teenagers, a broken phone charm, a battered paper crane. The photo is what catches his eye and it is a cold blade between his ribs when he makes out the smile on Genji’s face, the two fingers he’s throwing up behind Hanzo’s head.

It is cold still when he closes his eyes, the image burning into the back of his eyelids, colder still when the tip of Genji’s sword penetrates his stomach - Hanzo gasps out, his throat tight as he tries to push it in. For a moment, he cannot see, only feel the way it rips through his flesh. A dead son is less disappointing, he knows, but it is hard to push the sword deeper, to sweep it to one side and sever himself from the meagre existence he has left. It is what he deserves, he knows - it is what the family wants, loathe as they are to say it out loud - but he tears through four inches of flesh and the blade comes free. It slips from his hands and clatters to the ground, the eye of the inlayed dragon staring up at him as he doubles over, shaking from the pain.

(Hanzo has seen the disgraced before, kneeling before his father’s desk where they would beg his forgiveness. And he would stub his cigarette out in the ash tray, grey eyes piercing them as they would draw their blade, silent as they would plunge it into their bodies. He would never speak in those instances, yet they would still always know what he asked for. In this moment, Hanzo wished for his father to be here with him, for those grey eyes to urge him on.)

He picks up the sword again, wrists weak as he pushes the tip into the wound again. Genji never sharpened the blade, but it has not dulled since the day he received it, and now it snags its way through another three inches, slicing through muscle and sinew, until Hanzo feels as if he is spilling out the ravine he has carved into himself and the blade falls from his hands again. 

He cannot tell where, on his hands, his blood ends and his brother’s begins. Hanzo grabs the sword one last time and throws it across the room, angry tears in his eyes. He does not rise to see where it ends up.

When he pulls himself free of the house, a sodden obi holding the wound closed - when he flees to the farthest edges of Hanamura, he stumbles into the city’s small hospital, arm bound to obscure the tattoos, and they tell he is lucky. They tell him he is lucky that it didn’t go deep enough to get anything important, that he is lucky his intestines are only slightly perforated, that he should be alright with bed rest and antibiotics and morphine. They tell him, he only needs mild surgery, if he is lucky, he will be home in a few days. Hanzo does not feel lucky. Hanzo does not want to be lucky.

He slips out in the early hours, when they aren’t watching him closely, and raids the stores for painkillers. Cash and a stolen wheelchair get him beyond the city’s limits, beyond the glow of Shimada castle and the blood on his hands. In time, the wound will heal to a thick line and Hanzo pretends to forget about it.

It only stings again when he is older, grey creeping into his hair and calluses on his hands, three years dulling the line on his abdomen. He is working, escorting a payload through the busy city of Dorado, mind dulled to the monotony of a job - when he spots a flash of green in the crowd. Hanzo turns, but not fast enough to follow it, to catch the echo of laughter he didn’t think he would hear again. As he lies in his hotel bed that night, he is haunted by it, replaying it over and over again in his head as he stares at the cracks in the ceiling plaster. He clutches at his stomach, sick at the thought of his mind playing tricks on him again. 

His blade - rarely used, Stormbow is his preferred weapon these days - is quick from its sheath and there’s a roar in his ears as he reopens the scar, chest shuddering as the heat engulfs him. It burns more than the first time, his skin ripping further across his stomach, but still all he does is bleed and choke and bleed over the sheets. He is still very much alive, and he can’t bring himself to push it further in - so out the blade comes, leaving red patterns on the sheets as he drops it beside him, heaving breaths into himself. In, out, in, out. He closes his eyes.

It is house keeping that saves him. When he doesn’t reply, the maid enters and dials an ambulance before he can tell her not to bother. The paramedics tell him he is lucky - lucky that he didn’t pull anything out or sever anything vital, lucky that his kidney should heal fine, lucky that he should only need minor surgery and bedrest. They tell him that he is lucky, but Hanzo doesn’t feel it. They leave him empty, the flash of green just a ghost in his memory as he stares at a hospital ceiling lined with neon lights. His belongings are brought to his bedside, the sword cleaned and back in his sheath, but he does not lift his hand to try a third time. He can only close his eyes and sleep, the stitches in his stomach still burning.

**Author's Note:**

> what hanzo attempts is referred to as seppuku  
> from wiki:  
> Seppuku (切腹, "cutting [the] abdomen/belly") [...] is a form of Japanese ritual suicide by disembowelment. It was originally reserved for samurai. Part of the samurai bushido honor code, seppuku was [...] a form of capital punishment for samurai who had committed serious offenses, or performed because they had brought shame to themselves. 
> 
> for the purposes of rp, what hanzo did was an accident, which ill prob elaborate on at some point when its not nye and im not tired as fucko. happy new year!  
> (again, if you are japanese and find my portrayals offensive or highly inaccurate, please let me know so i can amend things. i appreciate constructive criticism)


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